NASA offers explanation for Mars mystery light

After a recent photograph of Mars ignited speculation that the Red Planet was home to intelligent life, NASA has come out with several different explanations for the mysterious light captured by the agency’s rover.

As RT reported earlier this week, on April 3 the Curiosity
rover managed to take a picture with its right-hand navigation
camera that seemed to show a beacon of light emanating from the
planet’s surface.

Unfortunately for those excited by the possibility of discovering
alien life forms, however, NASA poured some cold water onto the
idea.

"One possibility is that the light is the glint from a rock
surface reflecting the sun," NASA imaging scientist Justin
Maki said to the Houston Chronicle. "When these images were
taken each day, the sun was in the same direction as the bright
spot, west-northwest from the rover, and relatively low in the
sky."

In a statement made to Space.com, Maki added another possibility,
that the light could be caused by the way sunlight managed to hit
Curiosity’s camera.

"The rover science team is also looking at the possibility
that the bright spots could be sunlight reaching the camera's CCD
[charge-coupled device] directly through a vent hole in the
camera housing, which has happened previously on other cameras on
Curiosity and other Mars rovers when the geometry of the incoming
sunlight relative to the camera is precisely aligned,” he
said.

Finally, Maki also said the light could simply be a cosmic ray
hit – something that was suggested previously by Doug Ellison of
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who also noted that the image
captured by the left-hand navigation camera at the same moment
did not contain the light.

Before NASA delivered these possibilities, online bloggers
speculated that the light, which did not look natural, was a sign
of something much more dramatic than a glint of light from a
rock.

"This could indicate there there is intelligent life below
the ground and uses light as we do," Scott Waring wrote on
his UFO Sightings Daily website about the image. "This is not a
glare from the sun, nor is it an artifact of the photo process.
Look closely at the bottom of the light. It has a very flat
surface giving us 100% indication it is from the surface.”

Currently, Curiosity has arrived at its next destination, an area
with four different types of intersecting rocks known as “the
Kimberly.” The rover is scheduled to drill into the planet’s
surface, collect samples, and analyze them for signs that Mars
could have harbored life in the past.